Tag: teen problems

“Sometimes I feel that I don’t fit in. Years ago, during a sleepover at a friend’s house, some girl I barely knew asked questions about my ethnicity. I was wearing pink nail polish and she asked me, ‘Your parents allow you to wear nail polish?’ As if Muslim girls can’t wear something harmless like nail polish. Those ignorant comments come only once in a while, because my real friends know that I do fit in. People who know very little about me think my mom will come to school wearing a veil or sari, and they’re wowed by how hot she is (the only time her hotness makes me look good). Or they think Dad will have a long terrorist beard and bland clothes, but he always comes to school in a suit, looking all suave and charming. I don’t mind if my classmates see my parents, but it’s best that they don’t. Like most people my age, I pretend that my home life and my school life are on different planes of existence.”

During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, believers are not supposed to eat or drink from sunrise to sunset. For the first time ever, fifteen-year-old Almira is fasting with her family, and it’s hard work! Combined with learning to drive, her first crush, getting braces, and some drama with the new girl, Almira has her hands full. How can she get Peter to notice her at school? How can she get her grandfather to understand that she’s just a normal American teenage girl, and not trying to be disrespectful or rebellious? And why is the new girl so mean?

I have a special interest in books featuring minorities for young adults, and was so pleased to see a book about a Muslim teen on the shelves at my library, especially one that focuses on issues beyond cultural differences (for example, Almira’s crush, an understandable preoccupation for a teen, is a main plot element). While there is some discussion of religious beliefs, Almira’s family is portrayed neither as exactly like everyone else in the novel, nor as religious extremists with an oppressive belief system. In short, they’re normal, and there’s no need to dwell on it for pages. Young lovers of chick-lit will be delighted with Almira’s authentic voice and her interactions with her friends, as well as the teenage traumas of braces and driving lessons, while I, for one, am thrilled to see representations of the Muslim teen in the YA lit world.

“Because with Charlie, nothing was ever easy. Everything was windswept and octagonal and finger-combed. Everything was difficult and odd, and the theme songs all had minor chords.”

Vera’s former best friend Charlie is dead. It’s hard enough when your best friend dies, she thinks, but when he stabs you in the back and then dies, it makes things infinitely worse. Worse still, when he comes back to haunt you, with his ghostly form showing up in the car when you’re kissing another guy, or in the bathroom at school, it is the absolute pits.

Vera is eighteen, living with her father (you will love him, I think. He’s pretty much the Best. Dad. Ever!), an accountant and recovering alcoholic who invests his whole heart in making sure she has the best future possible. She works full time at a pizza place, and spends the rest of her time drinking to forget Charlie and the secret she is determined not to tell. Of course, it’s not as easy as all that-Charlie’s ghost keeps showing up at inopportune times, a silent, shaming reminder urging Vera to tell what she knows and clear his name.

The best part of this book? The format! See, the story is told in a creative way-all first person, addressed right to you, and by different speakers. I think readers will love Ken Dietz, Vera’s dad. He chimes in during the story, in chapters titled things like “A Brief Word from Ken Dietz (Vera’s Frustrated Dad)” and with flow charts, like “Ken Dietz’s Face Your Shit Flow Chart”. I kid you not, I actually made a copy of that flowchart and pasted it up on my bulletin board. And besides Ken and Vera (and even Charlie, who pipes up every few chapters), there is the Pagoda. That’s right, a building. The Pagoda is a park building with special significance to Ken and his ex-wife (she left them when Vera was 12), and it gets a few chapters of its own. Trust me, the Pagoda is hilarious-I think it’s the best and funniest part of the novel.

This book combines creative elements (a haunting, a mystery, a talking Pagoda) with a great format (many voices, FLOW CHARTS!), and very common social problems of young people. I think you’re going to love it! (And others did, too-this is a Printz Honor book, and a nominee for the Edgar Allen Poe mystery award!)

Before you panic about that quote, I’ll explain: it’s a description of past events, even though in the excerpt I realized it can come off as an order. Don’t worry! It’s not as bad as you think.

Well, it’s pretty bad. The novel takes place in Aspen Springs, a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents. Vanessa, Connor, and Tony have all attempted suicide, and meet in the ward. Vanessa has bipolar disorder, like her mother, and cuts herself when she cannot cope with her emotions. Connor, even though he looks like the perfect, all-American star student, feels isolated in his own family, as though he were an object instead of a son. And Tony has spiraled into the depths of despair after his mentor dies of AIDS. In the hospital, the three begin the lengthy process of sorting through years of pain and fear, searching for the combination of medication and therapy that will help them emerge into the sunlight again.

The three main characters take turns relating their own experiences in the novel: the speaker is identified at the beginning of each chapter, or whenever the speaker changes. Since the characters are all so fragile and desperately unhappy, it is (like Hopkins’ other works) a raw, harrowing novel. I had to take frequent breaks when reading it. The voices are so gripping that you feel them reach out of the book and suck you in. I actually found it to be so intense as to be overwhelming.

That said, this is Ellen Hopkins. That’s her style: she wields her words like a surgeon’s knife, slicing away at any extraneous padding in a story. There’s no sugar-coating here, that’s for sure. It’s an undeniably grueling read, but even as I was sickened and horrified about the experiences, feelings, and memories of the characters, there was a part of me that was able to stand back from the story and recognize the skill of the writer.

The three-voice-narrative was especially genius, I think. Because of the emotionally intense, introspective nature of a person going through a life-threatening emotional crisis, a single narrator could telescope the story in on itself, and make the entire novel too centered around tortured ruminations of the sad mind. But with three different characters telling the story, Hopkins anchors the story, and keeps it from being an unbroken personal manifesto of misery.

Oh, what can I say here? The topics are rough: sexual abuse, drugs, self-injury, abortion, and suicide, all described in graphic, but poetic language. However, Hopkins takes this dark side of the self and humanizes it, makes it understandable. She also refuses to tie up the story with a neat “happily ever after” bow, too, which is something I really appreciate. One gets the feeling that, to Hopkins, her audience is street-smart enough not to swallow a syrupy ending. There’s this underlying feeling of respect for her readers: she speaks to them as though they were adults. I think this one is definitely worth a read. (And the ALA thinks so, too: this book is an ALA Best Book winner!)

“We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest, blood dripping from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.”

I debated whether to review this book or not. I’m still not sure if I’ll leave this post up, or take it down in a few days. The problem with books covering eating disorders is that a lot of readers migrate to them for their triggering effects, to garner the strength to continue their disordered eating patterns. I know; I was there. I lost seven years of my life to it. I know the books well. And readers who are seeking this book to further their illness will find it anyway, with or without my review.

This raw, challenging story relates Lia’s struggle with an eating disorder. Her best friend, Cassie, recently died alone in a hotel room, a victim of a ruptured esophagus brought about by bulimia. Both girls suffered from eating disorders, and perversely encouraged the behavior in each other. Now Lia is haunted by Cassie’s ghost, who continues to encourage her in her downward spiral. On the night of her death, Cassie called Lia thirty-three times, but Lia didn’t pick up, and now the guilt is destroying her. Lia starves, fights with her family, stays awake miserably at night, trying to stave off Cassie’s image in her mind. It’s not pretty.

But, with Laurie Halse Anderson’s storytelling prowess, it is skillfully and mesmerizingly told. I’m reviewing the book because I think it’s different from other eating disorder stories, in that she focuses much more on the mental processes involved with anorexia, as opposed to a triggering recitation of calorie counts and weights. While those elements are certainly present in the story, the majority of the text is consumed with Lia’s tortured mental machinations, and readers are transported into the nightmarish territory of her brain.

Blank pages, pages of orders that Lia gives herself, such as “Must. Not. Eat” repeated over and over, and her actual thoughts (scratched out in the text, but still legible), followed by what she feels she must think, all combine to create a very realistic portrait of the despair of grief and starvation, without glorifying it. Like I said, I’ve been there. It’s not a pretty place, and Anderson is clear with the message. While I am still ambivalent about the subject matter, because I know it is so often misused by those struggling with similar issues, I am reviewing it because Laurie Halse Anderson is a master storyteller, and this is an excellently written book, that (to me), was careful to avoid exalting the illness.

It ain’t pretty, but it rings pretty true.

Happy Reading! (Actually, with this book, I feel like I can’t really say that, so I’ll amend to: Read it if you must, because it’s the best of all the books out there when it comes to a realistic portrayal of an eating disorder.)

I’d like to close with a quote from another reviewer, Jezebel: “Read without discussion or supervision, Wintergirls could indeed be triggering. But read as part of a conversation — or, perhaps, read by parents and other family members — the book could help make some teens’ worlds a little less dark”.